Halleck's New English Literature eBook

II. English prose dealt with a greater variety
of philosophical subjects. Shakespeare had voiced
the deepest philosophy in poetry, but up to this time
such subjects had found scant expression in prose.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is the great philosophical
writer of the age. In his greatest work, Leviathan;
or, The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth,
he considers questions of metaphysical philosophy
and of government in a way that places him on the roll
of famous English philosophers.

III. History had an increasing fascination for
prose writers. Sir Walter Raleigh’s History
of the World (1614) and Lord Clarendon’s
History of the Great Rebellion, begun in 1646,
are specially worthy of mention.

IV. Prose was developing its capacity for expressing
delicate shades of humor. In Chaucer and in Shakespeare,
poetry had already excelled in this respect.
Thomas Fuller (1608-1661), an Episcopal clergyman,
displays an almost inexhaustible fund of humor in his
History of the Worthies of England. We
find scattered through his works passages like these:—­

“A father that whipped his son for
swearing, and swore at him while
he whipped him, did more harm by his example
than good by his
correction.”

[Illustration: THOMAS FULLER.]

Speaking of a pious short person, Fuller says:—­

“His soul had but a short diocese
to visit, and therefore might the
better attend the effectual informing
thereof.”

Of the lark, he writes:—­

“A harmless bird while living, not
trespassing on grain, and
wholesome when dead, then filling the
stomach with meat, as formerly
the ear with music.”

Before Fuller, humor was rare in English prose writers,
and it was not common until the first quarter of the
next century.

V. Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), an Oxford graduate
and physician, is best known as the author of three
prose works: Religio Medici (Religion of a
Physician, 1642), Vulgar Errors (1646),
and Hydriotaphia or Urn Burial (1658).
In imagination and poetic feeling, he has some kinship
with the Elizabethans. He says in the Religio
Medici:—­

“Now for my life, it is a miracle
of thirty years, which to relate were not a history
but a piece of poetry, and would sound to common ears
like a fable... Men that look upon my outside,
perusing only my condition and fortunes, do err
in my altitude; for I am above Atlas’s shoulders...
There is surely a piece of divinity in us—­something
that was before the elements and owes no homage unto
the sun.”

The Religio Medici, however, gives, not the
Elizabethan, but the Puritan, definition of the world
as “a place not to live in but to die in.”

Urn Burial, which is Browne’s masterpiece,
shows his power as a prose poet of the “inevitable
hour":—­